rails before_destroy partial delete - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

I'm trying to figure out a way to partially delete/destroy dependent models in rails.
Code looks something like this:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :subscriptions
has_many :photos, :dependent => :destroy
has_many :badges, :dependent => :destroy
before_destroy :partial_destroy
def partial_destroy
self.photos.destroy_all
self.badges.destroy_all
return false if self.subscriptions.any?
end
...
Essentially, I want to destroy the photos and badges, but if the user has any subscriptions, I want to keep those, and also keep the user from being destroyed.
I tried with .each { |obj| obj.destroy } and using delete and delete_all, but it seems to not matter.
It looks like rails is performing some kind of a rollback whenever the before_destroy returns false. Is there a way to destroy part of the dependents but not others?

Answer 1

This is old so I expect you've forgotten it, but I stumbled across it.
I'm not surprised delete and delete_all didn't work, since those bypass callbacks.
You're exactly right that Rails performs a rollback if any before_ callback returns false. Because Rails wraps the entire callback chain in a transaction, you're not going to be able to perform database calls (like destroys) inside the chain. What I would recommend is putting a conditional in the callback:
If the user has subscriptions, kick off a background job which will do this partial delete later (outside the callback transaction), and return false from the callback.
If they don't have subscriptions, you don't start the background job, return true from the callback, and destroy your model as usual.

Answer 2

I ended up doing the following:
override destroy on the User model (see below)
not actually deleting the User, but rather destroying the dependants that are not needed, and blanking any fields on the User model itself, e.g. email.
I created a UserDeleter class that takes the user and performs all clearing operations, just to keep things cleaner / having some kind of single-responsibility
overriding destroy
def destroy
run_callbacks(:destroy) do
UserDeleter.new(self).delete
end
end
deleting dependants and clearing data on User
class UserDeleter
def initialize(user)
#user = user
end
def delete
delete_photos
delete_badges
clear_personal_data
# ...
end
private
def delete_photos
#user.photos.destroy_all
end
def clear_personal_data
#user.update_attributes!(
:email => deleted_email,
:nickname => '<deleted>')
end
def deleted_email
"deleted##{random_string}.com"
end
def random_string(length = 20)
SecureRandom.hex(length)[0..length]
end
#...
end